The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

When John Tyson took over as CEO of in 2000 as his father was easing into retirement, investors questioned whether an unproven heir who was once an alcoholic could lead one of the nation’s largest companies. Fourteen years later, Wall Street’s worries are gone. Shares of Tyson Foods have shot up 25% this year, boosting John Tyson’s personal net worth to an estimated $1.2 billion.

Business has never been better for Tyson, which breeds, slaughters, ships and sells the animals that end up in grocery stores and fast-food chains across America. Tyson announced in January that its quarterly profits had jumped 47% in the last year to $254 million. That kickstarted a steady ascent of the company’s stock price, adding a massive amount of wealth to one of America’s richest families. The Tysons’ fortune is spun up in a web of trusts, but altogether, it is worth $3.2 billion.

John, who declined to comment for this article, is the wealthiest family member. His aunt Barbara Tyson, a retired company vice president, inherited a fortune now worth an estimated $390 million when her husband Randal died in a freak accident at age 34 in 1986.

John’s grandfather, John W. Tyson, founded the poultry company in 1935 after moving his family to Springdale, Arkansas in search of opportunity during the Great Depression. He started a small business delivering Arkansas chickens to bigger markets like St. Louis, Kansas City and Chicago before expanding into chicken feed and poultry processing.

John W. Tyson died in a train accident in 1967, unexpectedly thrusting his son Don into the roles of CEO and chairman. Over the next three decades, Don built Tyson into one of the largest companies in America by gobbling up rival food processors. He first landed on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans in 1986 with a net worth of $275 million.

Don remained in the national spotlight when his old Arkansas friend Bill Clinton became president. A media investigation unveiled that Don’s lawyer had helped Hillary Clinton make some surprisingly good bets on commodities that turned $1,000 into $100,000.

In a separate case, Bill Clinton’s secretary of agriculture got charged with corruption for accepting gifts from the company. The official cleared the charges, but Tyson Foods had to pay $6 million in fines and costs—chicken feed for Don, whose personal net worth peaked at a high of $1.2 billion in 1997.

Don’s son John had worked at Tyson since he was a teenager, but he struggled with an alcohol addiction, leaving him in no shape to take over the company. “The only reason I was on the payroll is because I was the son of the boss,” John later conceded, according to multiplereports. “Any other corporation, I would have been thrown to the wolves.”

After his beloved uncle Randal, also a heavy drinker, died in 1986, John reconsidered his lifestyle, setting down the bottle for good four years later. “Just got tired,” he told Forbes in a 2004 profile. “It was God’s grace that gave me a chance to be clean.”

Don went through two non-family member CEOs before making his son chief executive in 2000. John took the top office at a turbulent time in the company’s history. The U.S. Department of Labor opened a lawsuit against Tyson, and the SEC fined Don and the company over $2 million for not properly disclosing company perks. Amidst the turmoil, John Tyson managed to boost company profits to record levels.

He made his biggest move early, acquiring Tyson’s larger rival IBP in a $4.6 billion leveraged takeover in 2001. It was a major gamble that made Tyson the world’s largest meat producer but also burdened the company with debt.

In 2006, he stepped down as CEO, remaining on board as company chairman. When his father Don died in 2011, John also became the patriarch of the Tyson family, still the largest shareholder in the company. Tyson stock took off the next year and has more than doubled since, thanks to major growth largely based on booming chicken sales.

Today John is a heavy hitter in Arkansas’ elite circles. He has maintained ties with America’s most powerful political family, the Clintons. John is already donating to a potential Hillary 2016 presidential run through Super PAC Ready For Hillary, alongside fellow billionaires Alice Walton, George Soros and Marc Benioff.

“John weathered the storm,” Woody W. Bassett, an Arkansas lawyer and one of John’s closest friends, told Forbes in 2004. “Steadily, he has emerged from his father’s shadow.” And now he’s also landed himself a spot among the world’s billionaires.